Shiv’s pregnancy unlocks the meaning of Succession’s story

It is important to note that the word “you” means “you”. SuccessionFans are vocal, passionate and dedicated. Twitter and Tumblr are platforms where fans analyze trailers and share their hopes and wishes for characters. Even though the show features ruthless capitalism, including some characters who supported a fascist candidate for president, all of the characters’ abuse by their fathers makes it very easy to sympathize with them. Sarah Snook plays Siobhan and her fans are fiercely protective. Sometimes, this brand of fandom can be expressed in counterintuitive and unexpected ways. For example, a frustration at the fact that the character revealed early on in the series to be pregnant.

There are a wide range of opinions, from the completely rational fear that the pregnancy plotline will put the character on the back burner to the much less rational belief that it is inherently misogynistic. I have seen fans call it “shoehorned in” and “lazy,” and generally have characterized it as unnecessary. Further complicating matters is that people who work on the show have said that the pregnancy storyline wasn’t conceived until late in the process of writing this season because of Snook’s own real-life pregnancy. Others have said that having any pregnancy storyline at all for a woman character is sexist. Writing one for Shiv, they claim, makes Jesse Armstrong’s and other writers look like sexists. SuccessionThey are sexists. But Shiv has always experienced misogyny on the show — in many ways, her experience in the narrative has been about trying to burst through the glass ceiling unsuccessfully.

On some level it’s understandable that some fans have their hackles up about Shiv’s pregnancy, given how pregnant characters and actresses have been treated on television in the past. Prior to I Love Lucy’s Lucille Ball refusing to hide her pregnancy on set, it was basically forbidden to talk about or even allude to pregnancy on television. It was considered scandalous for a married couple to engage in sexual relations. The idea of a married couple having sex was seen as too scandalous. I Love LucyBall’s husband Desi Arnaz who played Ricky Ricardo on screen, instead of having the actress hide behind counters and tables, wrote the pregnancy into the story. In the years since, pregnancy on TV has usually taken one of two forms: either productions change to allow an actress wearing baggy clothes, as Julia Louis-Dreyfus did in Seinfeld’s third season, or the pregnancy is written into the plot somehow, like with Nana Visitor in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becoming the magical surrogate for another character’s baby.

Third, there is an option that’s a terrible secret: shortening the season. Or, cut out the actress. The actress was cut from the show or the season could be shortened. The X-FilesWhen Gillian Anderson became pregnant in the second season of the show, Dana Scully’s character was abducted for several episodes. Sarah Jessica Parker found out she was expecting when Sex and the CityThe season of the show was reduced from thirteen to eight episodes when it was filming its fifth season. And even if a pregnancy storyline is written into a show because of an actress’ pregnancy, that doesn’t always mean that the storyline will be one with dignity. Charisma Carpenter got pregnant while shooting Joss Whedon’s AngelWhedon has been angry with her repeatedly, she says. but blamed her for “sabotaging” the season’s finale. After she had given birth to her first child, Whedon terminated her employment the following season.

In this context, it is important to note the concern that writers have expressed about the danger of terrorism. SuccessionIt is justified to sideline the only female lead character because pregnant women were burned onscreen before. But Shiv’s pregnancy, and her uncertainty about it, feels like whole new ground for how pregnant women are depicted on television.

Snook’s portrayal of Siobhan Roy, the only daughter of media mogul Logan Roy and supposedly the “smartest one,” is like watching someone swing on a flying trapeze. When she gets to the bar next, at any given moment she might fall. She does sometimes fall. But when she manages to pull off a scheme, or to actually outsmart her two older brothers, she doesn’t break a sweat. Snook’s work in this season has been remarkable, regardless of when Jesse Armstrong and the other writers decided that Shiv would be pregnant; watching her face in an episode, you always get the sense that she is processing two or three different feelings at once.

David M. Russell/HBO

Photo: Claudette Barius/HBO

Misogyny has always been a major aspect of Shiv’s experience in the world, and one the show hasn’t been shy about highlighting. When Logan tells her privately that he wants her to be the next CEO but won’t announce it publicly, you know the unstated reason has to be his pronounced sexism. When Shiv turns down her brother Kendall’s offer to join him in going against their father, he shouts at her that Logan thinks she “counts double because she’s a girl,” and that “it’s your teats that give you any value.” Her ability to tolerate sexist behavior, from her sexist father and then from Lukas Mattsson, a tech exec who sends frozen bricks of blood to his former paramour, is seen as a value in the highly toxic world where she is trying to grow her power. But it’s also a constant threat to her — to not only be seen as a woman, but to be treated as one.

It’s why her marriage to Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen, has always been so rocky. She resists any of his attempts to create a more equitable power dynamic in their relationship — she needs to have at least one man she can kick around in her life. When Tom may go to prison because of a corporate scandal, he starts begging her to have his child, and even starts tracking her period so that he can learn when she’s most fertile. For all his overtures of trying to win her over and make a family, she ends up becoming even more cruel to him, eventually telling him that she doesn’t love him.

Siobhan’s character, who is a woman of mixed feelings about her boyfriend and herself, becoming pregnant with him would be a delicious piece of drama. It also represents the journey that Siobhan had been on throughout the entire show. She wants more. Just click here to learn more.The woman wants to play on an even playing field with her two brothers. But the phrase she uses when she learns that Tom has sabotaged her attempts to find a divorce lawyer says it all: she “got mommed.” For all the work she has done, she is being treated in the same way the men in her life always treat women: expendable, unimportant, unintelligent.

David M. Russell/HBO

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when you consider how much of her own integrity Shiv has given up in order to navigate the corporate world. She was once a progressive presidential candidate’s staffer; she now talks women into not coming forward with allegations of rape. This story can be told without Shiv becoming pregnant. However, her pregnancy adds tension and context to the scenes. The show is about the pain that reverberates around a family — why should Shiv be left out of that dynamic?

It’s so far unclear whether or not Shiv even wants to have this baby, but she seems to know in some way that her duty to the family is to create a legacy. Not having experienced motherly love, she doesn’t really know how to express it either — last season her mother told her she should have had dogs instead of kids. When Kendall tells her in an intimate conversation that “maybe the poison drips through,” maybe the way that our father treated us means that we will also abuse our children, having Shiv be pregnant actually makes the show more inclusive of her emotional struggle. She is quietly experiencing a kind of pressure her brother will never have to face — the uniquely sexist pressure to carry a child when you don’t want to. It is much more important to her that the poison drips through his veins.

It’s refreshing, also, that among the many pressures in her life, Shiv’s pregnancy is not depicted as the most important thing in her world. Women get pregnant regularly, even though not all women want to have children or be pregnant. It’s a normal enough occurrence that it sometimes feels weird to me how little pregnancy shows up in television shows. Fans of Shiv don’t want her to be defined by her womanhood, and neither does Shiv. She is still trying to get power and her pregnancy in the current season is just a sign of that. No matter how competent you are, or how right you are, or how smart you are, you can always “get mommed.”